5 Final Insights from CompTIA ChannelCon 2018

No question about it, 40 percent channel growth is impressive. Want to know what’s really impressive, though? How about 40,000 percent channel growth?

That’s how much security vendor ID Agent has expanded its partner base since switching from a direct sales model to a channel-led approach in May of last year. By the close of that first month the Bowie, Md.-based company had two MSPs signed on as resellers. As of this week it has over 800.

“It’s going quite well,” says ID Agent CEO Kevin Lancaster (picturing), exercising an apparent gift for understatement.

Intriguingly, the key to that growth is a use case Lancaster didn’t have in mind when he first introduced his product, which scours the cybercrime underworld known as the “dark web” for stolen credentials. The original idea was to help MSPs alert their customers about compromised user accounts before someone uses them to break in. The system has proven to be even more powerful, however, as a sales tool. Nothing persuades a tight-fisted business owner to invest in layered security quite like discovering that the password they use to access the accounting system has been circulating among hackers for months.

“It’s become a tool that [partners] can use to demonstrate to the customer why they need to be taking security more seriously,” Lancaster says. “It wasn’t built for that, but we’ve seen this market grow and it’s been a very effective tool to help these MSPs grow.”